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Disney+ Won’t Feature Advertising At Launch

Disney’s new direct-to-consumer streaming service, Disney+ is set to launch in late 2019 and won’t be feature advertisements to begin with according to Walt Disney’s President of Advertising Sales & Sponsorships, Rita Ferro.

In an interview with Beet, where she talking about Disney’s new advertising division, she has said the following about Disney+:

“On the Disney side, while we are not doing advertising at launch right now, we are doing marketing partnerships around how we can actually bring brands together that we’ve done broadly with the company”

Disney have already began talking to brands that want to “experience the Disney customer far and away beyond just the traditional advertising,” says sales chief Rita Ferro.

During the interview, she describes Disney+ as “a broad, general entertainment brand for families” built around proven entities like Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, Disney and National Geographic.

Recently Disney have moved all of their advertising divisions into one, which is called Disney Direct To Consumer & International, which also contains Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+. Which is being done to help create a easier system for Disney to reach out to advertisers and to raise revenue for the company.

In this video interview, she explains the benefits for doing so:

It will also give them a much easier system for working with other departments within Disney, where she added:

“We’re also working very closely obviously with our product groups and our events groups and our parks and movie promotions teams,”

During the interview she also talked about how Disney’s other new streaming service, ESPN+ was able to gain over a million subscribers in the first five months. So they will be looking to do the same with Disney+.

My Take: While Disney+ might not have traditional advertising when it launches, Disney are looking at ways to bring in additional revenue. Adverts within the app, sponsored shows, product placement, short commercials before a show and the traditional TV style adverts could always be introduced later. Without any additional revenue streams for Disney+, the company would no doubt have to eventually raise subscription costs for users. So there is a balancing act.